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The Latest Word
Sacred Drift
by Len Bracken
Len Bracken's new book from Adventures Unlimited, The Arch Conspirator, takes
a deeper look at conspiracy in history than few other books ever have. It
includes essays and commentaries new insights on global politics and their
conspiratorial underpinnings. Bracken follows a maze through interwoven tales
from the Russian Conspiracy, through his interview with Costa Rican novelist
Joaquin Gutierrez, and follows his Psychogeographic Map into the Third
Millenium. The Arch Conspirator also contains Bracken's General Theory of
Civil War; A False Report Exposing the Dirty Truth About South African
Intelligence Services; the Neo-Catiline Conspiracy for the Cancellation of
Debt; Anti-Labor Day, 1997, with selected Aphorisms Against Work; Solar
Economics; and much more. It makes a remarkable addition to the library of
the thinking conspiracy theorist.
Bracken authored Guy Debord - Revolutionary(Feral House), documenting the
biography of the great Situationist thinker DeBord, who helped expose the
conspiracy culture as the society of the Spectacle. Bracken also served as
the translator of another great Situationist, Gianfranco Sanguinetti, with
the first English translation of a Situ classic, The Real Report on the Last
Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy (Flatland). Bracken is also well-known as
the editor of Extraphile, an underground newsletter of the Extranational
movement, and has contributed to Anarchy, Steamshovel Press and many other
magazines and alternative periodicals. The following essay is a press release
of the Baltimore-Washington Psychogeography Association (POB 5585 Arlington,
VA 22205; tel. 703-715-6816) . It does not appear in The Arch Conspirator,
but reflects some of the book's examination of the dark corridor of
conspiracy.
Members of the Baltimore-Washington Psychogeography Association made a
pre-Mother's Day (1999) expedition to the Basilica glorifying the Christian
Mother of God.
The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception stands near
the backbone of Washington, DC (WDC), the great divide called North Capitol
Street that separates city's northwest and northeast quadrants like a pair of
human lungs or the hemispheres of a brain.(l) The drifters approach from
Harewood Road, NE, and quickly spot an omen: a dead squirrel on the sidewalk
with what T-S knows are indications of rat poison on its carcass. The drift
continues, and suddenly a mockingbird lands on the driveway hedge and mocks
the blare of a car alarm. A second omen, but of what, they don't know. They
consider the meaning of this omen for a moment, and suddenly a woman
approaches from the direction of the Shrine.
"Excuse me miss," L-A begins, in Spanish, "If may I speak with you for a
moment."
"Of course," she says with a sense of inner serenity and strength.
"Can you tell me the difference between the Assumption and the Ascension?"
"Yes, well, the Assumption is when the angels absorbed the dead body of Mary
into heaven to be crowned Mother of God by the Father. We celebrate this on
August fifteenth every year with a Feast of the Assumption."
She looks at L-A.
"You know what the Ascension is, don't you?"
L-A shakes his head.
"The Ascension is when Christ rose into heaven and we celebrate it forty days
after Easter."
"You've been so helpful. I didn't know that, and none of my friends knew it
either. Where are you from?"
"Guatemala."
L-A imagines her prayers for peace. "Thank you very much."
"What was that all about?" T-S asks.
"Never mind."
T-S grumbles something about "the presumption of the Assumption," but L-A
doesn't want anyone to know that he has the slightest interest in religion,
which is why he asked the woman in Spanish and won't translate the answer for
T-S. You see, these drifters approach the largest Catholic church in the
Western Hemisphere from rival perspectives.
T-S, a fifty-year-old musician, subscribes to spiritist psychogeography--the
wine of life trickles out a bag-obscured bottle in Malcom X park while he
talks to Dante's statue as if he, T-S, were Virgil taking the exiled poet on
a drift through the world of gods, myths, and spirits; as if, in an ideal
sense, the series of cascading pools lined by a narrow granite rim were the
River Styx.
L-A finds reality in materialist psychogeography; the omens of human ecology
disclose themselves in Georgetown shop windows, in the juxtaposition, for
example, of a watch boutique featuring futuristic designs and the gargantuan,
backwards-spinning clock in F.A.0. Swartz. In an instant of Protagorean
perception (2), festive scenes of rag-tag Rabelasian jubilees clash with the
sleek, digital conception of time embodied in space-age watches. The wine of
life no longer flows the way it did in Medieval Spain during the five months
everyone took for holidays and festivals. Time, like the watches and
virtually everything else in Washington, is a commodity. All that's left in
the bottom of the bottle are a few seeds to sow in a new civilization.
The drifters enter the Shrine through the west entrance. They inadvertently
raid the bookstore by mistaking pamphlets for free brochures, then wander
down an empty corridor. A door opens and light from an office floods the
low-lit hall. A radiant black woman steps out.
"Can you tell us the way to the Crypt Church?" L-A asks.
"My pleasure."
"You have an accent. Are you from Africa?"
"Yes," she says with something of the same serene sense of inner peace as the
Guatemalan woman. "I'm from Nigeria."
She leads the drifters around a corner and points down a long hall.
"When you get to the end of this hall, just wind your way around to the Crypt
Church."
T-S in turn points to a chapel at the end of the hall.
"Is that a black crucifix?"
"Yes, that's Our Mother of Africa Chapel, the newest chapel here at the
Shrine. A Tanzanian carved the figure of Christ out of ebony and the cross
was hewn in cherry by a New Yorker. It's a beautiful collaboration."
"What's your favorite chapel here in the shrine?" L-A asks.
"I love all of them."
"Come on," L-A says, "if you had to pick a favorite, my guess is that it
would be the Mother of Africa Chapel."
She smiles and nods. After bidding farewell, the drifters begin their journey
through Memorial Hall, but soon drift apart. T-S follows the impulse to
absorb the light from racks of prayer candles. L-A passes the display of an
aluminum tiara donated by Pope Paul VI, then shuffles by the Hall of American
Saints--saints such as St. Frances Cabrini, benefactor of Chicago's orphans.
L-A then crosses the threshold--over the design of a slave-ship cargo-hold in
the floor--to Our Mother of Africa Chapel. His heart races at the sight of
her and then keeps time to the drums echoed in the inscription, "Mary, Our
Mother of Africa, hear the drumbeat of our prayers."
As the Nigerian woman said, the ebony and cherry crucifix is indeed
admirable. And in the gleaming atmosphere of the chapel L-A feels charitable
toward art, somehow no longer his sub-dada self. His inner speech is
momentarily devoid of slurs against religious kitsch, and he allows himself
to be drawn into what a passing tour guide tells a group of kids is a sacred
conversation: a sacred conversation after the sacra conversazione painting
technique popular in Italy in the fifteenth century. Here the conversation is
between a strong and beautiful Mother of Africa holding the Jesus as a child,
a slim dark figure of Jesus on the cross, and a right-to-left-reading
narrative relief, in bronze, depicting the African-American journey toward
emancipation.
Rocking to the beat of the drum, L-A brings his cosmopolitan ethics(3) to the
sacred conversation, ethics that entice him to identify with the other, in
this instance an idealized African woman not far in appearance from women L-A
knows. His soul enters into this conversation with Mother of Africa, her son,
and all her children in the heroic African-American race and elsewhere. L-A's
mind floods with memories of this other's faces, games, and music that are
his too, and he catches a glimpse of his spirit and the human spirit that
went into all of the creations dearest to him.
At least the Pope is with me on the cancellation of debt in his Third
Millennium Proclamation. The least we can do is cancel debt incurred by
dictatorial regimes now owed by countries like the new South Africa. The most
we can do begins with cancelling all debt, everywhere....
T-S appears between the columns that flank the chapel entrance, the Pillars
of African-American Society. L-A nods and the drifters silently wander into
the golden glow of the Crypt Church. The light dissipates ominously into the
sacristy. As a priest holds service for a handful of churchgoers, the
atmosphere takes foreboding hues. Without warning L-A or anyone else, T-S
slyly dons a ghoulish rubber mask, a patch-eyed scull with long black hair
and lips growing over its teeth. This gesture, uncharacteristic for a
self-described neo-Victorian, quickly turns L-A's sacred drift into a
superstition-mocking tale from the crypt. The spiritist and materialist
psychogeograher is himself and his opposite just as L-A is white and
non-white.
Notes
1. For the French origins and early history of psychogeography see Len
Bracken's Guy Debord-- Revolutionary (Feral House, 1997).
For spiritist psychogeography see the attempt by the London
Psychogeographical Association to revive Druid councils. Write for pamphlets
to BM Senior London WCLN 3XX England.
For a contemporary interpretation of WDC-based materialist psychogeography,
see the chapter "A Psychogeographic Map into the Third Millennium" from Len
Bracken's The Arch Conspirator (Adventures Unlimited, 1999), particularly
pages 71-73 for definitions.
For a humorous, if erroneous, interpretation of the Washington
Psychogeoqraphy Association, see the American Standard edition of Pat
Tracey's 1998 City Paper article "The Drifters."
2. Protagoras of Abdera (circa 490 B.C.-circa 421 B.C.) was the first
professional sophist. He contributed to grammatical and rhetorical theory,
and advised Pericles on the theory of democracy. Protagoras was exiled from
Athens for his atheist views. Unfortunately his treatise "On the Gods" was
burned. His "man is the measure of all things" argument has been interpreted
variously as the exaltation of human subjectivity and, by Marxists, as early
materialist anthropologism. Also of interest here is Protagoras' two logoi
theory that is both the first expression, according to Diogenes Laertius, of
the idea behind the proverb "there are two sides to every story," and more.
Plato tells us that in Protagoras' "Antilogic" treatise, Protagoras propounds
his two-logoi concept that holds, for example, that the wind is warm and
not-warm. According to Aristotle, Protagoras' two-logoi principle also
entails making the weaker argument stronger.
3. Cosmopolitan ethics refers to Strangers to Ourselves by Julia Kristeva
(Columbia, 1991); for definitions see pages 140 and 143. The spirit-soul
dictomy used in this paragraph is adapted from Kristeva's interpretation of
M.M. Bakhtin, the theoretician of dialogism.
Len Bracken is the author of Guy Debord - Revolutionary, the translator of
Gianfranco Sanguinetti's The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save
Capitalism in Italy and the editor of the newsletter Extraphile. His new
book, The Arch Conspirator, is available from AUP. Bracken can be contacted
at POB 5585 Arlington, VA 22205.
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